line+ studio Turns a 1958 Hangzhou Chemical Fiber Factory into an Industrial Garden on the Grand Canal

LOFT49 has already been reinvented once. The compound started life in 1958 as the Hangzhou Chemical Fiber Factory on the banks of the Grand Canal. In 2003 it became one of the city's first creative industry parks: artists and small studios moved into sheds that nobody else wanted. Two decades later, line+ studio, led by principal architect Peidong Zhu, has taken on the park's second phase. The team cleared most of the site and kept only buildings 6# and 10#, the two structures sound enough and intact enough to carry the story forward.

What interests us is the order of priorities. The practice frames its goal as reviving block life rather than polishing buildings, and as making history visible rather than preserving it behind glass. The result covers 95,901 m² on a 31,430 m² site. A dense ring of new offices and retail surrounds 7,130 m² of adapted factory fabric, and the two old buildings sit at the center as the hub of a public park. The studio calls this a move from the "factory workshop" to the "industrial garden". It is also the first project under its "Urban Jinshan" initiative, which uses urban memory to restart neglected districts. That framing is ambitious, so the useful question is whether the built work earns it.

A Rust-Toned Roofscape Read from Above

The new work comes from the old buildings, and you can see this most clearly on the roofs. Pitched and boxy weathering steel volumes sit on top of the retained structures and recall the profiles of industrial sheds without copying any one of them. The aerial view shows how much of the top surface works as a habitable landscape. Planting beds, terraces and walkways turn what used to be a service zone into a second ground.

The cantilevered steel box over the cream-rendered volumes is the boldest of the rooftop moves. It turns redesigning the building tops into something you notice from the street: a clear sign of new occupation that does not pretend to be original fabric. Glass balustrades keep the edges light, so the steel reads as an object placed on the building rather than part of its mass.

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